They, the politicians, take away our freedom and privacy – And All for nothing

The politicians have always kept repeating the mantra when they put a new law or regulation in place that limits our freedom, or takes away another piece of our privacy; that they do this to fight terrorism, organised crime, trafficking, currency speculation etc. etc.

Bellow is some interesting statistics about what ALL these new laws and techniques ACTUALLY accomplish in the real world. It’s grotesque how little we, the ordinary people, get in “return” for what we had to sacrifice in loss of freedom and privacy.

And for this our politicians gladly sold out our freedom and privacy rights- all for nothing!

And like a drunken driver they continue on this road in an ever accelerating speed.

The politicians want literally to know EVERYTHING we do: Every cell call you make, where we are when we make these calls and to whom, every SMS you send, every internet website you visit, every card transaction you make, every airline ticket you buy, every book you buy, every bank transaction you make, etc. etc.

To mention JUST A FEW EXAMPLES.

And they want to keep and store this information for as long as they like. To be “used” when they feel like it. Yes there are laws and rules that are supposed to put limits to the time “they” can keep these data and information. But as we have seen time and again from examples all over the world – these rules and laws means nothing in real life. They keep these data as long as they want, and share it with whoever the like regardless of what the laws says.

And this data and information is also “leaked” and outright sold.

Doesn’t it sound like a nice, cosy democratic and free society we all like to live in?

Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed.

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: ”It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

He added: ”CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

”It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. ”The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV.”

Nationwide, the government has spent £500m on CCTV cameras.

But Det Sup Michael Michael McNally, who commissioned the report, conceded more needed to be done to make the most of the investment.

He said: ”CCTV, we recognise, is a really important part of investigation and prevention of crime, so how we retrieve that from the individual CCTV pods is really quite important. ”There are some concerns, and that’s why we have a number of projects on-going at the moment.” Among those projects is a pilot scheme by the Met to improve the way CCTV images are used.

A spokesman for the Met said: ”We estimate more than 70% of murder investigations have been solved with the help of CCTV retrievals and most serious crime investigations have a CCTV investigation strategy.”

Officers from 11 boroughs have formed a new unit which collects and labels footage centrally before distributing them across the force and media.

It has led to more than 1,000 identifications out of 5,260 images processed so far.

“One of the most dramatic revelations is that both the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council – among the smallest local authorities in the UK – have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department.”

For your information: Shetland Islands have 21,990 people (2001), San Francisco has 808,976 people (2008)

“The City of London [borough] has 619 cameras, but a population of only 9,000. Thisrepresents 68.7 cameras per 1,000 people.

The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras – 1,113 – is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and DublinCity Council combined. “

Some more statistics:

The borough of Wandsworth has a population of 260,380 (2001)

Boston has a population of 609,023 (2008), Johannesburg has 3,225,812 (2001) in reality around 7 million and Dublin has 1,187,176 (2006).A combined total of – 5,022,011+.

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